Landis can prove he’s innocent, but it won’t be easy

The fact is, nearly everyone, even Landis, agrees that the results of the tests on his second urine sample will almost certainly come back positive for elevated ratios of testosterone. After all, the samples were taken at the same time and subjected to the same tests. Unless there was a foul-up in the procedure, or the sample was contaminated, it doesn’t look good.

AP

At this point what happens in the lab is more important than what Floyd Landis did on his bike.

“Most likely,” says Dr. Massimo Testa, a physician and exercise physiologist who has been team doctor for some of the top professional cycling teams and has worked 15 Tour de France events, “the second sample of going to be the same as the first.”

Those are the facts. And if that happens the drumbeat of guilt will only increase. Landis will be fired from his racing team (Phonak has already made that clear) and he will almost certainly be suspended from racing, at least for a while.

So, is there any hope of innocence?

“It’s do-able,” says five time Olympic gold medalist Eric Heiden, now an orthopedic surgeon who works with professional cycling teams. “But it is more difficult.”

The problem is that the process will be complicated, and even if it does come out to show that Landis has a naturally high level of testosterone in his body, the explanation is likely to go over the heads of the average sports fans whose understanding of issues isn’t the best.

The other day I heard a national radio commentator say that Landis tested “positive for testosterone.” Since testosterone is naturally occurring hormone in the human body, that’s hardly a shocker. All men and women have some testosterone in their bodies.

The question is what the ratio of it is compared to epitestosterone. In most people the ratio is 1:1. Landis had to be at least 4:1 because that’s the standard for a positive reading on the Tour.

“The problem is, they don’t tell you what your level of testosterone is,” says Testa. “If you are negative (below the 4:1 ratio) you are negative.”

So what Landis will be trying to prove is not only that he has “unusually high,” levels of testosterone in his body, but that his epitestosterone decreased to make the ratio more than 4:1. After all, he was tested three previous times on this year’s Tour and the reading were negative.

Again, that’s possible.

“I don’t think people know specifically what happens with that level of stress,” says Heiden.

“What he is going to have to do,” says Testa, who is working with Heiden to start up the new Orthopedic Specialty Hospital in Murray, Utah, “is get into an excellent hospital that has no connection to the Tour with a good department of endocrinology that has a name. Then they need to study him as a subject to prove that something physiologically changed under the stress.”

The problem is, that could take a long time, long enough that even if Landis proves his point, it may be long after the average fan has already given up on him as yet another drug cheater in sports.

Like everyone, Heiden was blown away to hear that Tour de France winner Floyd Landis had tested positive for elevated levels of testosterone.

“I was super disappointed,” Heiden said when I talked to him Friday. “It was like the final nail in the coffin.”

Heiden has more than a passing interest in Landis and the Tour. He won his medals in speedskating at Lake Placid in 1980, but after that he became a professional bike racer and even competed in the Tour de France in 1986. (It kicked my butt,” he says. “You’re not talking about finding your second wind, it is your fourth or fifth wind.)

Heiden says he knows Landis well enough “to sit down and have lunch with him,” and his gut feeling is that he would be an unlikely candidate to cheat. But who can say? Phonak team member Tyler Hamilton has always been considered one of the Tour’s good guys. When he was under investigation for blood doping, Hamilton railed against the testing and the methods. But he was still given a two-year suspension which will always taint his career.

That’s the one part of the Landis story that doesn’t fit. If he was going to cheat, why would he use something that is testosterone-based. After all, the “big three” of Tour testing are EPO (an endurance building drug), amphetamine (for energy), and steroids (which are identified by elevated testosterone.)

“If you want to cheat, right now, in 2006, there are lots of ways to do it,” says Testa. “You are going for the yellow jersey, you are in the attacking stage, why would you think you wouldn’t be tested? Why would you use testosterone?”

That certainly makes sense. And media outlets are hearing from lots of cycling enthusiasts who are complaining that we are rushing to judgment. Shouldn’t Landis be considered innocent until proven guilty?

Unfortunately, that’s now how it works. When Phonak announced that Landis tested for elevated levels of testosterone, he was in violation of the rules. The team immediately said it would fire him if the second sample confirmed the first.

That’s just the hard reality of the sport today. Teams, and riders, must be utterly beyond reproach. If Sample B comes back positive, there won’t any question about whether Landis was in violation of the standards. He was.

The question is why? Would he really have attempted to slip a banned substance past the drug testers?